Search has its own bitter lesson

Why Google’s New AI-Saturated Search Page Will Be A Disaster

Google didn’t invent full-text search of the Internet – that honor belongs to early pioneers such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. But for the last 25 years or so, Google has…

The enshittification of online search? Privacy and quality of Google, Bing and Apple in coding advice

Even though currently being challenged by ChatGPT and other large-language models (LLMs), Google Search remains one of the primary means for many individuals to find information on the internet. Interestingly, the way that we retrieve information on the web has hardly changed ever since Google was established in 1998, raising concerns as to Google's dominance in search and lack of competition. If the market for search was sufficiently competitive, then we should probably see a steady increase in search quality over time as well as alternative approaches to the Google's approach to search. However, hardly any research has so far looked at search quality, which is a key facet of a competitive market, especially not over time. In this report, we conducted a relatively large-scale quantitative comparison of search quality of 1,467 search queries relating to coding advice in October 2023. We focus on coding advice because the study of general search quality is difficult, with the aim of learning more about the assessment of search quality and motivating follow-up research into this important topic. We evaluate the search quality of Google Search, Microsoft Bing, and Apple Search, with a special emphasis on Apple Search, a widely used search engine that has never been explored in previous research. For the assessment of search quality, we use two independent metrics of search quality: 1) the number of trackers on the first search result, as a measure of privacy in web search, and 2) the average rank of the first Stack Overflow search result, under the assumption that Stack Overflow gives the best coding advice. Our results suggest that the privacy of search results is higher on Bing than on Google and Apple. Similarly, the quality of coding advice -- as measured by the average rank of Stack Overflow -- was highest on Bing.

Can We Survive Technology

Search the history of more than 1 trillion web pages.

A week of not using a search engine

A week or so ago, I wondered if I actually needed to use a search engine as much as I did. Why was I sending so much traffic to a third party service, especially since I can’t seem to find a search engine which aligns with my ethics and delivers good search results?

Archived Fact-Checked Media — MediaVault

“A few people seem to misunderstand this. I’ll make it really simple: No the bots aren’t searching Google. The bots spread/amplify disinformation and susceptible humans see that disinformation and search for those topics. When the bots go down, so do the number of searches.”

Peer Knowledge Assisted Search Using Community Search Logs

Search engines have become an increasingly important educational tool. By just typing a few keywords into a search engine text-box, finding information has become an easy exercise. However, some people cannot use search engines effectively for

Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment

Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was."

Platform Information Provision and Consumer Search: A Field Experiment

Despite substantial efforts to help consumers search in more intuitive ways, text search remains the predominant tool for product discovery online. In this paper, we explore the effects of visual and textual cues for search refinement on consumer search and purchasing behavior. We collaborate with one of the largest e-commerce platforms in China and study its roll out of a new search tool. When a customer searches for a general term (e.g., “headphones”), the tool suggests refined queries (e.g., “bluetooth headphones” or “noise-canceling headphones”) with the help of images and texts. The search tool was rolled out with a long-run experiment, which allows us to measure its short-run and long-run effects. We find that, although there was no immediate effect on orders or total expenditures, the search tool changed customers’ search and purchasing behavior in the long-run. Customers with access to the new tool eventually increased orders and expenditures compared to those in the control group, especially for non top-selling products. The purchase increase comes from more effective searches, rather than an increase in activity on the platform. We also find that the effect is not only driven by the direct value of suggested searches, but also by customers indirectly learning to perform more effective searches on their own.

The Case Against Google (Published 2018)

Critics say the search giant is squelching competition before it begins. Should the government step in?

The Web Can Thrive Without Google’s Search Monopoly

Viable browsers and meaningful contributions to web standards can be sustained with more modest revenue streams, writes Alissa Cooper.

Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse | The Walrus

As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search

The nuclear option is gaining traction as web traffic collapses and Google refuses to negotiate with content creators

Information foraging

Information foraging is a theory that applies the ideas from optimal foraging theory to understand how human users search for information. The theory is based on the assumption that, when searching for information, humans use "built-in" foraging mechanisms that evolved to help our animal ancestors find food. Importantly, a better understanding of human search behavior can improve the usability of websites or any other user interface.

Google’s broken link to the web

With AI search results coming to the masses, the human-powered web recedes further into the background

Google Search Changed: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of AI Search - Boxcar Marketing

Google Search is not longer about indexing the web, it's about being an AI assistant.